Details of our new shield for Arduino is now on-line, along with a new cable breakout board that incorporates open collector drivers outputs for the sensors. This board, and the revised shield that also includes open collector drivers, should solve any sensor reading problems that people might have had when interfacing to 5V micro controllers.

You can never do enough testing, but unfortunately when it comes to a commercial product it can also be a case of ‘ship or die’. We did lots of tests on the HUB-ee wheels, resolving various manufacturing issues along the way, and when everything worked great we put them on the market. Then one of our early adopters got in touch with an issue – the quadrature encoders didn’t appear to work properly.

Someone asked us about how much load our HUB-ee wheels could cope with - so we thought we would do a quick test ... We built a little flat top bot with four wheels and a couple of IR distance sensors, and put a 5kg tub of stones on the top to see if it would cope.

With the first test we used the speedy 120:1 wheels -- The robot moves forward quite easily, but the wheels stall when it tries to turn.

We just updated the construction ideas page with links to the design files for the TrikeBot from our homepage. No instructions or help files yet, just the cutting files for anyone with a laser, and a desire to try and figure it out themselves.

Just watched the excellent new product post by Sparkfun - they really did a great job of demonstrating the idea behind HUB-ee wheels - A real time robot build on camera - shows off how easy they are to use.